Nearly half of Democrats support using force to keep Donald Trump from the presidency, a University of Chicago survey shows, as the researcher warns 2026 midterms risk historic violence.
University of Chicago political scientist Robert Pape says the latest nationally representative survey from his Chicago Project on Security and Threats, conducted with NORC, found 25 percent of American adults, about 65 million people, now back the use of force to prevent President Donald Trump from serving. Among self-identified Democrats the figure hits 44 percent.
Pape called the result a break from earlier readings and a clear warning. Support for force against Trump stood near 9 percent at one earlier point and 14 percent in September 2025. A May 2025 CPOST survey had already put Democratic support at 39 percent. The newest jump, he said, is not ordinary noise in the data.
Newsmax reported Pape’s comments from a recent interview with podcaster Chris Williamson, in which the CPOST director framed the numbers as evidence of a deeper shift he labels “violent populism.”
Pape has tracked American attitudes toward political violence since 2021. He told Williamson the current climate has not been matched since the 1960s.
"We haven't seen this level of violence, political violence, since the 1960s."
Focus groups and survey experiments run by CPOST found that 55 percent of respondents who endorsed force against Trump associated it with lethal violence such as assassination. Others pictured riot-style disorder. Pape stressed the practical meaning of those answers.
"This is a stunning number. This is not just another turn of the data."
He pointed to converging pressures: deep partisan hostility, rapid demographic and social change, economic anxiety, and a sizable minority of the electorate willing to treat political force as justified. Social media amplifies the mood, he said, but does not create the underlying drivers.
The survey lands against a backdrop of real violence aimed at Trump and others. On July 13, 2024, Thomas Matthew Crooks opened fire at a Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. Trump was struck by a bullet. Rally attendee Corey Comperatore was killed and two other spectators were wounded. The long-term human cost of that day continues, including the later death of another man wounded in the Butler rally shooting.
Two months after Butler, authorities arrested Ryan Wesley Routh after a Secret Service agent spotted him with a rifle near Trump’s West Palm Beach golf course. Routh was later convicted of trying to assassinate Trump and sentenced last February to life in prison.
Federal prosecutors charged a Pennsylvania man in 2025 over alleged online threats to assassinate Trump and other officials. In May 2026 they charged a Miami Beach man with repeatedly making the same kind of threats.
Pape also noted the 2024 killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson by left-wing activist Luigi Mangione. An Emerson College poll taken shortly afterward found 17 percent of likely voters called the killing “somewhat or completely acceptable,” including 22 percent of Democrats. A Generation Lab survey of 1,026 college students that year found 48 percent said the killing was “totally or somewhat justified.”
CPOST analysis of nearly 400 charged threats against members of Congress from 2001 to 2024 showed threats jumped 600 percent from 2016 to 2017 and never returned to earlier levels. Both Democratic and Republican lawmakers have been targets.
National Institute of Justice-funded research counted more than 520 deaths in far-right extremist attacks since 1990 compared with 78 deaths in far-left extremist attacks. The 1995 Oklahoma City bombing by Timothy McVeigh, which killed 168 people, remains the most notorious modern example of anti-government far-right terrorism. Pape’s point is that the newer pattern cuts across the usual left-right ledger and now includes open tolerance for force against a sitting or returning president.
Sixteen percent of Americans, in the same recent polling Pape cited, supported Trump using the military to suppress Democrat protesters. The symmetry is incomplete, yet both numbers show how quickly large minorities now treat political force as an option.
Pape’s sharpest warning concerns the coming election cycle. He described the period from vote counting through the seating of winners in January as “the real danger zone.” Under a worst-case reading, he said, the 2026 midterms could become “the most violent election in American history.”
"Once you come to see that there are tens of millions of Americans that support political violence, that changes everything."
That warning arrives while institutional fights over election integrity continue. The Supreme Court recently cleared the way for Trump’s DHS to screen voters with federal citizenship records before the midterms, a step aimed at lawful rolls and public confidence.
Partisan combat is already intense. A lame-duck Democrat recently filed a sweeping set of impeachment articles against Trump as the midterm fight heats up, underscoring how personal and institutional the conflict has become.
Trump’s own governing choices, including a rare pocket rescission that cut nearly $1 billion from DEI and noncitizen programs, keep the policy battle lines bright. None of those disputes justify violence. The survey data show a large share of one party’s voters now say force is acceptable to settle them.
Pape’s “violent populism” frame treats the post-2016 years as a new era in which ordinary partisan hostility has begun to license physical coercion. The CPOST numbers put hard percentages on that claim. A quarter of adults and 44 percent of Democrats are not fringe samples. They are mainstream enough to shape street behavior, online radicalization, and the security burden around every major political event.
Lawful disagreement, contested elections, and hard-fought policy fights belong in a constitutional republic. Open support for force to deny a president his office does not. When tens of millions say otherwise, the country has a problem that polling alone will not fix.
Voters who want secure borders, clean elections, and equal justice under law should treat these findings as a direct challenge to that order, not as another abstract culture-war skirmish.
